Some kids look into the sky and dream of riding in a space ship, but for me, my sky was a globe, and my hours were spent dreaming of places that were so far from a child's life in Kankakee, IL that they might as well have been the Moon.

For some reason, I've always been drawn to the obscure & remote places of the earth, far more curious about the rougher corners of the planet than I've ever been about places like London or Madrid.

My "bucket list" has always had far more places like Timbuktu and Tibet than its had Tuscany or Tahiti.

While I've spent countless hours researching travel to places like that, alas life got in the way of much of that. I never did the study abroad or Peace Corps thing. Nikole was good enough to pacify my curiosity with a ten day trip to Guatemala (and more pedestrian locales like Ireland & France), but for most of the last 15 years, I was to busy chasing professional ambitions to chase any personal dreams.

A couple of years ago, I took an ACYPL trip to Southeast Asia, which rekindled that spirit of adventure. But there remained a big hole in the dreams of that kid - Africa

A couple of hours from now, probably 35 years after I first dreamed of it, starts a 17 day journey across three countries. We start in Namibia, then go to Botswana & my journey ends in South Africa. And despite a lifetime of planning, I have no idea what to expect.

But 6 hours from landing in Africa, I'm as excited and curious as I was when I was a kid with his globe, in his upstairs room on Budd Blvd.